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Lives of Women Change in This Period?

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Lives of Women Change in This Period? Austerity, Affluence and Discontent: britain, 1951-1979 Part 4: “We’re not beautiful, we’re not ugly, we’re angry” How far did the lives of women change in this period? Source 1: Swinging London – young people on Carnaby Street in the 1960s 2 Austerity, Affluence and Discontent, 1951-1979: Part 4 How much did the lives of women change between 1951 and 1979? Source 2: A photograph from the1950s showing a husband and wife in the kitchen Women’s role in the home1 The traditional role for women was to be a good wife and mother – to keep the home clean, and make sure the children and husband were fed. This was still considered to be true even in the early 1960s, especially amongst working-class women. Women were expected to give up their job and personal independence when they married or when their first child was born.According to Woman’s Own magazine in 1961, ‘the most important thing they can do in life is to be wives and mothers’.2 The ‘Janet and John’ series of children’s early reading books was first published in Britain in 1949 and reinforced the traditional role for women. Janet was always helping out mum with the housework, while John cleaned the car or built bonfires with dad. Dad went to work, mum stayed at home; mum was always prettily dressed and dad was always appreciative of a clean house and cooked meal. Keeping the house clean and the family fed were not always easy. In the early 1950s feeding the family often required a lot of planning and preparation as rationing was still in effect, and clothes had to be washed and the house cleaned by hand. FOCUS : changes in shopping Before the 1950s, food shopping had been done either by means of regular home deliveries (milkmen or grocer’s vans), or by going to shop in local butchers, bakers and greengrocers. Often this shopping had to be done every day as it was difficult to keep perishable food for long without 1 Family life in 1964 is discussed in a BBC documentary which may be seen at http://goo.gl/EtppXI 2 This is quoted as Source B in Stuart Clayton, Mass Media, Popular Culture and Social Change in Britain since 1945 (Edexcel, 2010), page 158. 3 Austerity, Affluence and Discontent, 1951-1979: Part 4 a refrigerator. Shops were very different to how they are now. They were small and usually very specialised in one particular product. Local shopkeepers often knew most of their customers by name. Customers did not pick items up themselves and take them to a till – they had to ask a shop assistant to get them what they needed from the shelves or a store room. The 1950s saw the rise of self-service shops in which customers picked up the items they wanted to buy and took them to a till to pay. In 1947 there were only ten self-service shops in the whole of Britain. By 1956 there were 3,000, with 12,000 by 1962 and 24,000 in 1967. The self-service system started with the Co-op in London in 1942 because of a wartime shortage of staff, and then spread to other shops like Tesco in St Albans in 1947. By 1952 half of Tesco stores were self- service. Source 3: A woman shopping in a 1950s ‘self-service’ shop The next step was the supermarket, a large store which sold a wide range of different products in large quantities. There is some debate about which was the first British supermarket3. Sainsbury’s converted a building in Croydon in 1950, while its first purpose-built supermarket opened in Eastbourne in 1952; Tesco converted a disused cinema in Maldon, Essex which opened in 1956. There were 367 supermarkets in 1960, but by 1967 there were 3,000. Supermarkets were efficient and convenient and stocked a variety of products and produce.Their displays were often very impressive and their produce kept fresh for longer in refrigerated cabinets. Rising car ownership meant that people were able to travel further to shop and carry more home with them. The government system for keeping prices comparable between shops (called ‘Retail Price Maintenance’) ended in 1964 and supermarkets were able to offer discounts that smaller shops could not match4. By the end of the 1950s the daily local shop had been replaced by the weekly supermarket shop. Convenience foods, supermarkets and new, cheaper appliances made women’s role as housewives easier: Refrigerators and supermarkets meant you no longer needed a daily shop or delivery • Washing machines5 meant hours more free time that was not being spent washing by hand • Vacuum cleaners meant cleaning could be done quickly without brushes, dusters and • dustpans. 3 A BBC News clip about the beginnings of British supermarkets may be seen at http://goo.gl/0umkSN 4 A BBC News clip about Asda introducing the ‘superstore’ or ‘hypermarket’ may be seen at http://goo.gl/GWdOas 5 A 1950s advert for a washing machine may be seen at http://goo.gl/qrLww6 4 Austerity, Affluence and Discontent, 1951-1979: Part 4 According to New Look magazine in 1964: The female kitchen is the temple of those twin symbols of the new life – the refrigerator and the washing machine.6 In an interview about life at that time, Christine Fagg, who was a housewife in the 1950s and 1960s, said: I wanted to desperately do things outside the home. I was always trying to think of shortcuts to the housework, to get out and stimulate my own interests, and that’s where the washing machine, Hoover, etc. really came into their own.7 Advertising domestic products was still aimed entirely at women,8 e.g. Kenwood appliances used the phrase, ‘Your servant, Madam’. Adverts reinforced the idea that women should be good wives and mothers: The child who didn’t get beaten up at school anymore because his mum washed his shirts • bright white The husband who resisted the temptation of other women because his wife kept their • house clean using disinfectant. Between 1957 and 1967 annual spending on weekly and monthly magazines which contained many of these adverts went up from £46 million to £80 million a year. The biggest growth was in ‘women’s magazines’ – Woman was read by 50% of women in the UK in 1957.9 As well as this, radio programmes like Woman’s Hour bombarded housewives with recipes and handy household tips. A 1950s survey by the newspaper Manchester Guardian found that 40% of women were content with their role but 50% were bored a lot of the time. Gradual recognition of the boredom of the life of the housewife led to founding the National Housewives’ Register. This was set up in 1960 by Wirral housewife Maureen Nicol as a mutual support network for bored housewives, organising talks and coffee mornings through local newsletters to break up the daily routine. It had 15,000 members by 1970.10 6 This is quoted in Sally Waller, A Sixties Social Revolution? British Society 1959–1975 (Nelson Thornes, 2008), page 85. 7 Dominic Sandbrook, White Heat – A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties (London, 2006), page 691. 8 Clips about women in 1950s advertising may be seen at http://goo.gl/B86I0l and http://goo.gl/rMAFmf 9 Stuart Clayton, Mass Media, Popular Culture and Social Change in Britain since 1945 (Edexcel, 2010), page 163. 10 Sally Waller, A Sixties Social Revolution? British Society 1959–1975 (Nelson Thornes, 2008), page 85. 5 Austerity, Affluence and Discontent, 1951-1979: Part 4 Women and education11 Even after the 1944 Education Act women’s education was still biased towards domestic life. The 1959 Crowther Report confirmed this and the Newsom Report in 1963 said that schools should provide a flat for girls to practice the skills of running a home and that a girl’s education should follow ‘broad themes of home making’.12 Many women left school at the minimum leaving age and married young. The average age for women getting married in the 1960s was 22, and two in every three births were to women under the age of 25.13 According to the 1959 Crowther Education Report on education which was commissioned by the government: The prospect of courtship and marriage should rightly influence the education of the adolescent girl.14 In 1954 it was considered that too many girls were passing the 11-plus exam compared to boys. In that year girls should have made up two-thirds of pupils going to grammar schools so a law was passed to limit the number of girls who could go. Facilities at some girls’ grammar schools were not as good as those for boys as they did not have decent science facilities. The Report to the House of Commons Select Committee 1973 stated: Perhaps the greatest single contributory factor to the position of women as second class citizens in the matter of employment has been the lack of opportunity for girls in school to participate in the technological developments of recent years [physics, metalwork, computing, etc.]15 Many of the women who passed their O Levels went on to do A Levels, although many of those women who did make it as far as university married soon after getting their degrees. The number of women studying at university grew steadily as a result of improving education, and because of the availability of university grants to pay for living expenses: In 1970, 183,000 women went to university, making up 40% of the total student population; • In 1975, 214,000 women went to university, making up 41% of the total student • population.16 However, students were still twice as likely to get a university place if they were a boy rather than a girl into the 1980s.
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